The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

by Jonathan Sacks

  and lifts the needy from the ash heap;

  he seats them with princes

  and has them inherit a throne of honour.

  (1 Samuel 2:8)

  We hear the power of hope expressed in those words. Perhaps the social structure is not immutable. Perhaps the low can become high. Perhaps there is justice after all. A secular morality, says Walzer, ‘is likely to fall short of the radical newness and sharp specificity of divine revelation’. He asks us to consider, as an example, Thomas Nagel’s ‘objective moral principle’ that we should not be indifferent to the suffering of other people. Walzer comments, ‘I acknowledge the principle but miss the excitement of revelation. I knew that already.’31

  Not only is secular moral philosophy often dull, flat and predictable, one of its least lovely features, as we saw in the previous chapter, is that its greatest thinkers embodied a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. They reinterpreted human behaviour to give it the worst possible construction.

  So for Marx the consolations of religion are simply the way by which the rich and powerful keep the poor and weak in their place. For Freud the voice of conscience is just the once repressed, now returned, voice of the father we wanted to kill and who now haunts us with guilt. For the neo-Darwinians every act of altruism is merely the work of selfish genes blindly seeking to replicate themselves. ‘Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed.’

  No wonder that the more we believe these stories the more we are minded to think that morality is for wimps and that there is some truth in Michael Douglas’s famous remark as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.’ Of course it does not, not even for evolutionists. But the combined impact of a century and a half of high-minded cynicism is to sap our moral energies and confuse the moral sense.

  At the end of the day there is a difference between discovering morality and inventing it. Discovering it means that it exists independently of our will. It comes to us as a call from the heart of being. Love your neighbour. Love the stranger. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Stretch out your hand to the poor. Do not hate. Do not harbour a grudge. Do not take revenge. Do not stand idly by in the face of injustice. Forgive. I, the Lord, do these things. Go thou and do likewise. There is a power to these teachings that lifts the human spirit and mobilises moral energies.

  No human substitute has had anything like that power. Yes, we should promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but what if the greatest number find the greatest happiness in things that are plain wrong, like prejudice in a racist society, or violence in a lynch mob? Utility can conflict with integrity and sometimes we have to do the right thing even though it makes people unhappy.

  Yes, we should do our duty. But to whom? Our family, our friends, our neighbours, our fellow countrymen, humanity as a whole? What should we do if these things conflict? And does duty exhaust the moral life? As Bernard Williams was fond of pointing out, sometimes a person who is nice because she feels it to be her duty is simply less nice than one who is so because it comes naturally.

  * * *

  Alasdair MacIntyre’s point in After Virtue is that the Enlightenment project – a morality constructed on rational grounds with no reference to religion or tradition – simply failed, not because it came up with no answers but because it gave too many of them. Kant’s ethics are incompatible with Hume’s, which are irreconcilable with Bentham’s, which are anathema to Schopenhauer. The philosopher’s slide rule does more sliding than ruling, and we are left bewildered and confused.

  I have not argued in this chapter that you need to be religious to be moral, or that you need to believe in God to believe in good. Manifestly that is not so. Goodness is widely distributed through our species. Whether it is Bill Gates and Warren Buffett giving away billions of dollars to charity, or the nurse whose gentle care and quiet smile ease the fear of a single sick patient, whether it is Nelson Mandela’s ability to forgive those who imprisoned him and enslaved his people, or the teacher who by believing in her pupils brings out the best in them, the world is full of goodness, whether or not we call it God’s grace.

  This is important for religious believers to acknowledge. There is something profoundly self-serving and self-deceiving in thinking that ‘we’, us and our fellow believers, have a monopoly of virtue, that we alone find favour in God’s eyes. It is not so, and faith should give us the humility to see that it is not so. The great religious teachers show us virtue and moral courage where we least expect it, among people the world ignores or takes for granted. They teach us that a stranger may be an angel, and there is moral beauty in a slum, a shanty town, Skid Row, if you have eyes to see and a listening heart.

  Yet there is a connection between religion and morality nonetheless. The great religions are the most effective moral tutors the world has ever known. They begin by turning our gaze outwards, to the human other who is a reflection of the divine Other. They teach us habits of virtue by getting us to do ethically demanding things, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, helping the needy, giving time and money to charitable causes. There is hardly a religion that does not encourage its followers to do deeds such as these. And they are done in the context of community. For it is in community that we learn the habits of cooperation and mutual support that make us ‘moral animals’. As Darwin showed us, without altruism there could be no community, and without community we could not survive.

  Judaism and Christianity are used to being countercultural forces. Christianity began as a small and persecuted minority. Judaism has spent the better part of four thousand years in that condition. So both know how to sustain identity and principle even when this means going against the flow. That is why they can keep alive values and institutions necessary to our survival, that are being lost in the wider world outside. Many Christians fought slavery.32 Many Jews fought apartheid in South Africa. Those motivated by the opinions of others conform to the crowd, while inner-directed individuals listen to the still small voice of internalised conscience. We need religion to remind us of the importance of marriage and fidelity and loyalty; of the fact that success, fame, wealth, affluence, the siren songs of today’s culture, are trivial in comparison with character and integrity. And we need communities in which the virtues live, are rehearsed and are valued. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to sustain the moral life.

  Atheists like John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell fully understood this. Mill wrote about societies in general:

  Whenever and in proportion as the strictness of the restraining discipline was relaxed, the natural tendency of mankind to anarchy reasserted itself; the state became disorganized from within; mutual conflict for selfish ends neutralized the energies which were required to keep up the contest against natural causes of evil; and the nation, after a longer or briefer interval of progressive decline, became either the slave of a despotism or the prey of a foreign invader.33

  Russell wrote that even the greatest civilisations like ancient Greece and Italy of the Renaissance eventually lost their ‘traditional moral restraints’, because people lost faith in the ideas that supported them. The result was that ‘the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion’.34

  Social cohesion is precisely what religion sustains and much else undermines. When societies grow affluent, when the burden of law-abidingness falls on the state and its institutions, when people define right and wrong in terms of externalities – punishments and rewards – and in terms of what other people do and are seen to get away with, when people focus, as they naturally do, on immediate benefits not long-term sustainability, then society begins to e
rode from within and there is little anyone can do to halt it.

  The signs are unmistakable:

  People lose a sense of shame. Rudeness is taken as a sign of sophistication. People pursue the pleasure of the moment. They lose their respect for leaders. The young no longer defer to the old, and the old behave as if they were young. The difference between the sexes is blurred. People get irritated by the least touch of authority and they dislike any rules that inhibit their freedom to do as they like.

  A Christian evangelical bemoaning the secularism of today? No: Plato speaking about the democracy of Athens.35

  A law of entropy governs societies. They rise to power and affluence and then they begin to decline as individualism saps the collective spirit that brought them to greatness in the first place. When this happens, only a countercultural force can revive flagging energies, renew institutions, defeat cynicism, generate trust and restore altruism. The Abrahamic monotheisms are the most powerful countercultural forces the world has ever known because they speak to something indelible in the human spirit: the dignity of humanity as the image of God.

  So Dostoevsky was wrong and Tolstoy right. Morality does not suddenly break down when people stop believing. People do not conclude: God does not exist, therefore everything is permitted. But they do in the long run, like an orchestra without a conductor, lose the habits that sustain the virtues that create the trust that preserves the institutions that shape and drive a moral order. That is when you see the first signs of discontent with secularisation. People, even those who do not practise a faith, start sending their children to faith schools. Children, even if only a few, start becoming more religious than their parents. Religious voices begin to be listened to with respect, if only because so many other voices sound cynical or self-seeking. The moral sense is not a blazing fire but a flickering flame, and it seems to have been the fate of faith to have kept it burning even when the winds of individualism are strong.

  God and good are connected after all.

  9

  Relationships

  A Roman lady asked Rabbi Yose bar Halafta, ‘What has God been doing since the six days of creation?’ The rabbi replied, ‘He has been sitting and arranging marriages.’

  Midrash1

  Said Rabbi Akiva, ‘If a man and a woman are worthy, the Divine presence rests between them.’

  Talmud2

  As long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.

  Alexis de Tocqueville3

  Genesis begins with human relationships, a whole book of them. It is about husbands and wives, parents and children, and the tense rivalry between siblings, as if to say: This is the locus of the religious life. In the love that brings new life into the world. In marriage where love becomes a covenant of loyalty. In parenthood, the one thing that, this side of heaven, grants us an intimation of immortality. In the family as a bond between the generations. In the calibrated distance between individuals that allows them to be joined in responsibility and fidelity while at the same time left the space to be themselves – a modern theme to be sure, but at the heart of these biblical stories also.

  Something of immense consequence is being asserted here. Genesis, the book of ‘first things’, is about matters that have not just chronological but also axiological priority. We are told about relationships first because they matter most. There are two aspects to God in the Bible, for which it uses different names. There is Elohim, the God of creation, Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God, the God of nature and nature’s laws. But there is, holier still, Hashem, the God of relationships, the God who loves and is the ground of love, the God who brings the universe into being in love.

  Ultimately, that is what the faith of Abraham is about: love as the supreme creative force within the universe. Not sex, passion, physical desire, though in The Song of Songs the Bible has a place for that too. Not procreation and the continuity of the species, though that is the first command God gives to humanity. Nor is it mere sentiment, though love as emotion is not missing from the Bible’s stories. It is love as loyalty, love as a pledge of mutual responsibility, love as the commitment of two persons to share their lives and destinies, love as the redemption of solitude.

  The faith of Abraham makes two monumental claims: first, that the relationship between God and humanity is a matter of love, not power; second, that you can build a society on the basis of love, love of neighbour and stranger, that leads us to care for their welfare as if it were our own. These remain, even now, astonishing ideas, and one would say that they were wildly utopian were it not for the fact that the faith of Abraham has lasted longer than any other known civilisation. Its adherents may have fallen short time and again, but they never quite lost their sense that there was something moving and humane about this ideal and the demand it makes of us.

  There is a clear structure to the way the Bible tells its story. Genesis, which is about personal relationships, is the necessary prelude to Exodus, which is about politics and power, liberation and nation-building. We find the same pattern in the closely linked books of Ruth and Samuel. First comes the intensely moving story of Ruth, her loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi and the kindness of Naomi’s distant cousin Boaz. Then, at the end of the book, we discover that Ruth becomes the great-grandmother of David, Israel’s greatest king. It is a prelude to the books of Samuel, which tell of the birth of Israelite monarchy.

  Genesis-Exodus and Ruth-Samuel are the literary way of establishing the primacy of the personal over the political. It is as if the Bible were telling us that on the surface, history is driven by the pursuit of power; in reality, it is driven by the text and texture of interpersonal relationships. Power diminishes those who wield it no less than those they wield it against. We grow not through exercising power over one another but by kindness, attachment, compassion; by listening to one another and making space for one another. Politics makes the headlines. It always did, even if headlines in ancient times took the form of hieroglyphic testimonies on temple walls or inscriptions carved into triumphal arches. But what the world thinks large the Bible thinks small, and what the world dismisses as of minor account the Bible focuses on and frames with minute attention.

  I am aware that in this chapter, more perhaps than in any other, I will be challenging strongly held stereotypes. I will be arguing for a radical re-reading of some famous biblical passages. I will be bypassing the note of asceticism that entered Abrahamic monotheism through Paul and the Church Fathers, that saw sex as somewhat sinful and the pleasures of the flesh as secondary to those of the spirit. There is in Judaism no place for monasticism and celibacy. Some of this came from the heritage of Greece: Socrates thought that carnal passion disturbed the rational mind, Plato that the family stood in the way of total identification with the polis, and Epicurus that love and marriage were simply too great an emotional risk. In any case, we inhabit a culture in which talk of a normative sexual ethic is as politically incorrect as it is possible to be. But this I know beyond doubt: that it was the strength of its families and its consecration of the love between husband and wife, parent and child, that made Judaism what it is and gave it the passion and resilience it has always had.

  I believe that God lives in the grace of our dealings with others. Religion, for monotheism, is about relationships.

  * * *

  What is lost when religion declines? The standard answer is ecclesiastical power. God in the form of his official representatives, the clergy, comes to exercise less and less authority in government, in the mediation of knowledge through schools and universities, and eventually in culture as a whole. The standard definition of secularisation is the removal of more and more areas of life from ecclesiastical control.4

  My suggestion is that we should think in a different way since, as I have argued, monotheism is not about power, but about the limits of power. Religion is really about relationships. Therefore when religion declines, we would expect the effect to be visible in relationships. To be
sure, there will still be men, women, sex, reproduction, children and sibling rivalry. Those are biological phenomena. They exist among all higher life forms. They form the very pulse of Darwinian evolution. Subtract religion and culture from humanity, and you are left with biology. That will always remain.

  But there is a dystopian nightmare that this is what we will indeed be left with: sex without love, promiscuity without limits, love without commitment, fatherhood without responsibility, predatory males, females often left to bear the burden of childcare alone; in short, the sexual habits of the higher primates. The faith of Abraham is about consecrating biological instinct and etching it with the charisma of moral beauty.

  Today in the West we have a series of societies in which almost half of children are born outside marriage, where people are marrying later or not at all, where close to half of marriages end in divorce, and where the chances of a child growing to maturity in a stable relationship with its biological parents are slimmer than they have been for a long while. Why should this matter? Because children pay the price. When stable marriages cease to be the norm, children are more likely to live in poverty, and a significant minority to be abused, sexually assaulted, abandoned, intimidated or neglected.5 We can trace the impact. Within the space of two generations, against a background of steadily increasing affluence, there has been an increase of between 300 and 1,000 per cent in the incidence of alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, stress-related syndromes, depression, violent crime, suicides and suicide attempts among the young.6

  Children pay the price for the abdication of responsibility on the part of their parents, and it can be a high price. Two thousand years ago, the rabbis could no longer accept the literal truth of the phrase ‘visiting the sins of the parents on the children’. It struck them as an injustice, and they reinterpreted every passage in which this phrase appeared (they held that it referred only to instances where children repeated the sins of the parents).7 Today, in a sense, secular society is visiting the sins of the parents on the children.